How do you come up with names?

[comatose]

Yooo, so I have a lot of trouble with coming up with creature and place names. I either end up just smashing the keyboard to come up with things or using a generator. So my question to the community, is how do you come up with your creature/place names?

Spoiler

Also, if you guys can help me, I need a species name for these guys, currently calling them chimeras but it's causing some confusion and I'd like them to have something different than that.  male, female

 

[Mobotropolis]

I did not want to spend too much time on something that may not be important, so I came up with three rules.

1. The Pets and Items that are important or exclusive to the In-Game Universe are anagrams of common words used to describe those items. The only exception to the rule so far is the player name's species, but that may change as I continue working. 

I'd call them Rahmice (Ruh-my-ice) based on my naming convention. 

Other Takes: Charmei (Cu-ha-arm-may, or Charmy) and Iremach (Eye-er-mack)

2. Names are Randomly Generated. I don't have a great many characters fleshed out beyond the shopkeepers at this point, but due to the mechanics of the world this is taking place in I'm aiming for as many gender-neutral names as possible. 

3. Fitting the central theme of the game, all locations are parodies of real world locations. The general idea being to both spark a hint of nostalgia for the player and to make them aware of what can be done there just by reading the name. 

 

[Evander]

I'm not sure what exactly your chimeras are based off of, but they look like moose-griffins to me. Not sure if that helps or not. I'm not the best at naming species. I've only named one. ^_^;;

Four of the five bird species in my game will be based on actual mythical birds (Roc, Pamola, Diniao, and Phoenix) so it seemed appropriate to keep those names. The fifth is the Orit (a completely made-up species), and I honestly can't remember how I came up with it. I think I was just throwing sounds together and the people I was talking with about the game at the time really liked that one.

I had a name for the continent at one point, but I don't like it anymore so it's a bit nameless. I actually used Latin for part of many place names and it worked out well. The place names sound cohesive (as if they were named by the same group(s) of people) and due to how I handled the English portion of the place names, it's easy to tell what type of environment the place is. I also used some English (England) place-name prefixes/suffixes to help me in naming certain areas of the map. There's a wiki list somewhere online that I used. The prefixes and suffixes have meaning that help describe what kind of place something is. The list gave examples of how they are used as well.  

I wish you the best of luck in finding a naming convention that works for you!!

 

[omee]

hi! a tool thats helped me for ages and still does is this brilliant thing;

http://rinkworks.com/namegen/ , even though the page is a bit old and clunky, it works fantastically! to start out you can just pick default, medium or short names from the first dropdown and hit go; every page refresh gives you new set of random gen names. if you get more into it and learn how the manual generator works, you can get more specific kind of names if you already have a theme in mind. hope it helps!